David McElroy

As I pulled up to the terminal at the Birmingham airport early Thursday morning, my eyes scanned for Concourse C. But something in my heart was unexpectedly scanning for something else.

I felt the tug of something from the past. From other trips to this place. From a love that was once powerful and overwhelming, but which has been dead for years.

I had come to the airport Thursday to drop a friend off for a flight to Houston for medical treatment. I used to fly through this building pretty regularly, but I hardly ever have reason to come to the airport anymore. But something about just coming to the terminal awakened memories of coming here to meet a woman who used to come see me.

Which concourse did her flights use?

I couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter, but that bothered me. My heart remembers joyfully embracing her as she arrived and feeling her slip away when she left each time. The memories were vivid this morning, but I stupidly debated whether it was Concourse A or Concourse B where these scenes took place.

It was easier to let my rational mind debate irrelevant details than it was to feel what my heart insisted on feeling.

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The woman was flabbergasted to discover that I don’t own a television.

“But what do you do every night after dinner?” she asked with a tone bordering on shock.

I explained that I spend most of my free time reading and thinking and writing — and I said that I also spend a good bit of time talking with friends. She seemed dubious, but said she could at least understand talking with friends.

She wanted to know how I watch streaming services in order to view the popular shows she listed. Everybody watches those. I told her I don’t watch any streaming services, so I’ve never seen any of the shows she mentioned.

She would have seemed less surprised if I had told her I spend my evenings in the basement making sacrifices to Baal. She struggled to respond, as though her mind couldn’t grasp what I was telling her.

“But that’s not normal,” she finally said. “Everybody watches the same shows. We all talk about them. Why don’t you just get a television? They’re cheap now. And you could be like the rest of us.”

I changed the subject, because it would have sounded too arrogant — from her point of view — if I had explained that the last thing I want is to be like her. I’ve spent years breaking free from the brainwashing of the “normal life” she loves so much.

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Our culture is locked in a battle over objective reality.

The ability to observe objective facts and then use reason to interpret them was at the center of human progress for the last few hundred years. Science that came out of this allowed us to improve the world. We made ourselves fabulously wealthy by historical standards. We improved the lives and health of everyone.

Today, we’re slowly throwing all that away.

One group claims that men can become women — and vice versa — just because they feel that way. They claim that subjective feelings — across a wide range of issues — determines what is allowed and what is not.

Another group is perfectly happy to follow politicians who tell lies at an unprecedented scale. These people don’t mind the lies and don’t mind ignoring reality they don’t like — just as long as their side holds power.

In the meantime, a few of us still insist that truth matters. Objective reality matters. Character matters. Honesty matters.

For those of us in that intellectual and moral “no man’s land,” we watch as clowns to the left and jokers to the right insist that seizing power and defeating enemies is all that matters.

And some of us know that nothing can change until our society can once again show a principled commitment to objective reality and truth — as a broad consensus.

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